[whybroke]

Apparently the last 15 years of your working life you will be more rare than a woman programmer (3% vs 5.8%)

It is absolutely fantastic the gender issue is being thought about at long last.

But it is absolutely horrifying the ageism issue is not. Or worse, is as glibly explained away as past discrimination used to be.

[kibwen]

It might also be partly explained by selection bias among SO's audience. At my first real job there was no other developer there below 40, and a few approaching retirement age (indeed, I was brought on to replace a developer who had retired). But I was the only one who used SO, and really the only one who turned to the internet for answers at all rather than reaching for the books on their shelves.

(And also, our proportion of female developers was way, way higher than 5%.)

Older developers are certainly out there, but they're woefully underrepresented in open source.